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Never again. Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Bullet, consider yourself dodged. Official ratings numbers for Sunday night's Academy Awards broadcast aren't out yet, but early Nielsen data suggests it drew about 4% more viewers than last year's show, which translates to around 39 million. That's far from good by historical measures, but it's not nearly as bad as it probably deserved, if the near-universal raspberries from critics are anything to go on. It almost certainly won't edge out the 2008 show and its 31.8 million viewers for the dubious distinction of being the least-watched Oscars ever. (Update: The early projection was accurate. As Horizon Media's Brad Adgate notes, the official audience of 39.3 means that the Oscars drew fewer viewers than the Grammys for the first time since 1984.)

Make no mistake: The 2012 Oscars were a travesty. And while they might have benefited from comparison to the previous year's weird, disjointed show, they were bad in a way that those of us who suffered through them start to finish won't soon forget.

If the Oscars are to reverse their long-term ratings slide, Band-Aids aren't good enough anymore. This show needs radical change. Here's my blueprint.

1. Get a host who's funny now. What I mean by that is one who's currently in the funny stage of his or her career. Whatever your opinion of Billy Crystal, I think we can all agree his peak years are well behind him. For all the social media chatter last night lamenting what might've been if Eddie Murphy hadn't pulled out, he's not really an improvement in this regard.

Fortunately, Sunday's broadcast, while a failure in most regards, did at least suggest a few possibilities. Chris Rock is funny, high-energy and looks good in a tux. Sacha Baron Cohen deserves consideration for generating one of the event's genuinely memorable moments with his ambush of Ryan Seacrest (the other moment being Angelina Jolie's flash of leg, which quickly earned its own Twitter tribute account). An Oscars hosted by Baron Cohen as a rotating cast of his characters would be genuinely unpredictable enough to qualify as must-see TV.

On the other hand, it feels like time for the ladies to take a turn. Women always make up a majority of the Oscars audience, and last night they accounted for most of the best laughs. I'd love to see a Kristin Wiig/Tina Fey tandem. They'd certainly have no need of Bruce Vilanch's services. Or what about Ellen Degeneres? Her J.C. Penney commercials last night were better than most of the actual Oscars segments, and her 2007 stint as host was a ratings highlight, drawing 40 million viewers.

Two other candidates: Jimmy Fallon would be an all-around solid choice and ought to be on any short list. Finally, although this would never happen for many reasons, Joel McHale would be dynamite as a host. He's wickedly funny in a rat-a-tat way, he's a firehose of pop culture references, he looks the part and he can do the song-and-dance thing, as the musical episodes of "Community" have shown. Nobody's better at parodies and in-jokes than that show's writers. Hire them to write the jokes and McHale to deliver them and it would be the best Oscars in a dog's age, guaranteed.

2. Front-load the proceedings. This should be obvious, but the show needs to start off strong. The first 15 minutes sets the tone and creates the impression that lingers. After that, it's fine if things get a little draggy here and there.

That's why the first award handed out is traditionally Best Supporting Actress. More than anything else, viewers tune in to see actors and actresses, and they want to see one of them onstage getting a statue early. Yet for some reason the organizers ignored precedent this year and started off with cinematography and art direction. That's just dumb.

3. Less telling, more showing. You would think the folks at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences would be the last ones who'd need this reminder, but movies are a visual medium. Last night featured an awful lot of moments where someone stood at the podium and talked about a movie. That needs to be held to an absolute minimum.

Remember those little tributes they used to do for every Best Picture nominee? Each was like a two- or three-minute trailer. How many times have you heard someone headed to the cinema say "We can't be late -- I don't want to miss the previews"? People love trailers. Bring the tributes back. Of course, that's been less feasible since the Best Picture category was expanded to accommodate up to 10 films. Ten 2-minute trailers adds a lot of running time to an already bloated broadcast. So...

4. Cut some categories. Sorry, documentarians, sound mixers and directors of animated shorts. Your work is valuable. You deserve all the awards you get. We just don't want to watch you get them. You're gone.

5. Make the Academy younger. I left this one for last because it's the most difficult. Maybe it's impossible. No one's going to vote to shorten his or her own term as an Academy voter. But as long as it's a lifetime gig, the median age of the electorate is going to be inconveniently high and "Oscar material" is going to remain synonymous with "nostalgia fest."

As Alessandra Stanley points out in the Times today, only one of the nine Best Picture nominated films was set in the present this year. That's just screwy. Much as I loved "The King's Speech," its historical setting is what gave it the edge over "Black Swan" and "The Social Network," equally if not more worthy films, in last year's voting.

Expanding the Best Picture category was meant to accommodate the usual costume dramas and biopics while making room for edgier and/or more commercial contenders. But that was an indirect solution and obviously hasn't done much to solve the problem. The direct solution is to make the Oscars all about the movies that matter now, and that's not going to happen as long as the Academy is controlled by people who vote based on how much a movie reminds them of the films they loved back when.